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In today’s business startup environment, if
you don’t move fast, you get run over. Without a sense of
urgency, people and businesses just can’t move fast enough. Speed
is the driver because customers have a zero tolerance for
waiting, and there are always competitors gaining on you.

John P. Kotter, in "A Sense of Urgency," delves
into the how-to required of entrepreneurs on that first step,
avoiding pitfalls along the way. He is convinced that increasing
the sense of urgency is the toughest of the steps necessary for
effective change.

Urgency is not frantic activity born of excess energy, anger, or
frustration. These do result in high activity levels, but results
will be slow in coming and often misdirected. Here are six more
positive steps to increasing a true sense of urgency, according
to Kotter:

Behave with urgency every day. Always
demonstrate your own sense of urgency in meetings,
interactions, memos and e-mail, and do so as visibly as
possible to as many people as possible. You are the role
model for everyone in your organization. If your tone or
actions lack urgency, it percolates quickly to everyone, and
you reap what you sow.

Consistently communicate urgency. Urgency is
a set of thoughts and feelings, as well as a compulsive
determination to move and win now. Aim for the heart, not
just the mind. Look for the element of every story that will
compel employees into action. Make employees feel empowered,
not stressed, to buy into the need for urgency.

Create action that is relentlessly aimed at
winning. Make sure your actions are exceptionally
alert, and focused on success. Show some progress each and
every day, and constantly purge low value-added activities.
Be quick to reward the winning actions of everyone on the
team.

Bring the outside in. Be on the lookout for
compelling data, people, video, websites and other important
messages from outside the company. Strive to connect internal
activity with external happenings and challenges. Highlight
competitor wins in the marketplace, and continually challenge
your own team to do better than competitors.

Find opportunity in crisis. Always be alert
to see if crises can be a friend, not just an enemy, in order
to destroy complacency. Think of crises as potential
opportunities, and not only dreadful problems that
automatically must be delegated to the damage control
specialists. But don’t assume that crises inevitably will
create the sense of urgency needed to perform better.

Deal with the urgency-killers. Remove or
neutralize all the relentless urgency-killers, people who are
not skeptics but by their actions keep a group complacent or
create destructive urgency. Examples are people who are
always “too busy” or stretch every task delivery beyond
reasonable limits.

One of the main obstacles to a sense of urgency is complacency,
which often sets in after a success. When the CEOs and employees
are riding high on a wave of profits, complacency can creep in
unnoticed. It's easy to hand out rewards and praises without
looking down the road and outside the box. Eventually a
competitor comes along to trample you into the dust.

Another frequent obstacle is the false sense of urgency. The
enemy of urgency is a full appointment calendar, when everything
becomes urgent. Here you need flexibility, smarts, and guts to
reprioritize less important tasks, or purge them altogether.

Finally, eliminate fear, both fear of failure and fear of
success. Fear thrives in an environment where people get punished
for mistakes and discouraged from experimenting. Fear of success
means people worry that success will bring uncomfortable or
distasteful changes.

So my challenge to each of you is that you wake up each day with
a sense of urgency both at work and in your personal life, and
practice the recommendations above. Constantly critique your
business and look for opportunities to improve. Lead by your
actions, and the team will follow.